Darrell Issa Gets Played

Congressman Elijah Cummings released the full transcript of the testimony given before the congressional committee on which Cummings serves, the one chaired by Darrell Issa, concerning the IRS dumbassery.

I'm not going to play poker, ever, with Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland, because the man knows how to play a hand. Late yesterday, when nobody was watching, but just in time to make the evening news cycle, he released the full transcript of the testimony given before the congressional committee on which Cummings serves, the one chaired by Darrell Issa, concerning the IRS dumbassery that has been conflated into a scandal by the unique combination of the professionally mendacious and the easily duped that passes for our political establishment these days. Cummings and Issa had been wrangling over the release of partial transcripts for a while now. But what Cummings did effectively undermined Issa's prodigious attempts at serving up this nothingburger over the past month or so.

The Cincinnati manager in the transcript revealed Tuesday is a self-described "conservative Republican" who told congressional investigators that he asked Washington IRS officials for guidance on a tea party case on Feb. 25, 2010, the same date listed in an inspector general's report as the genesis of the IRS's targeting efforts. The Cincinnati supervisor also confirmed that an IRS screener from his office developed the controversial search criteria that the agency used to identify groups for extra scrutiny. "These facts are a far cry from accusations of a conspiracy orchestrated by the White House to target the president's political enemies," Cummings said in a letter to Issa on Tuesday. Cummings acknowledged in his letter on Tuesday that Washington - but not the White House - was partially responsible for the IRS controversy. "I am not suggesting that IRS employees in Washington, D.C. played no role in these activities," he said.

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(You will note the deft attempt by the Post reporter to keep the story aloft by mentioning that Cummings "acknowledged" that "Washington" was "partially responsible" for the controversy, which very few people doubted, and that this comes at the end of a long passage of testimony in which the controversy is thoroughly explained, and all conspiracies neatly debunked. Nicely played, Post reporter. You will go far.) Issa, of course, proceeded to birth some bovines all over the Beltway.

The chairman said in a statement Tuesday that Cummings' document dump will "serve as a roadmap for IRS officials to navigate investigative interviews with Congress." "After unsuccessfully trying to convince the American people that IRS officials in Washington did not play a role in inappropriate scrutiny of tea party groups and declaring on national television that the case of IRS targeting was 'solved' and Congress should 'move on,' this looks like flailing," Issa added.

Not that it will matter to the vast peanut gallery of cranks and paranoids to whom Issa has been playing ever since he took over the chairmanship of this committee. But to the rest of us, this is pretty damned dispositive. And any legitimate political reporter who includes the "IRS" scandal in the list of the things in the "cloud" over the president's second term should be flogged out of the profession.